Power consumption is of particular concern in limited-power devices (e.g., battery-powered devices) such as laptop and notebook computer systems, cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable media players, remote control units, hand-held devices including video game players, and the like. These devices are limited in size and weight and generally portable, and therefore they typically use smaller and lighter batteries of limited capacity. However, these types of devices may be used for a variety of computationally intensive and therefore power-hungry applications such as three-dimensional (3D) rendering and video encoding and decoding. As a result, such devices can usually be used only for relatively short periods of time before their batteries need to be recharged.